Overview

The most important work in the entire
history of printmaking must be the first
edition of Albrecht Dürer's Apocalypse,
a series of 15 woodcuts and a title
page published in 1498. This series crystallizes
the first mature style of Dürer,
the father of the northern Renaissance;
it was a revolution in the history of
woodcut; and it has had an overwhelming
impact on the artistic understanding
of the apocalypse in all media—painting, drawing, print, sculpture,
stained glass, and tapestry—throughout
Europe and eventually America,
to our own day. The Apocalypse woodcuts crystallize
Dürer's new style based on his 1494–1495 trip to Italy to study the novel
works of the Renaissance. He created
the 15 Apocalypse images during
the two years following his return
to Nuremberg. Dürer drew upon late
gothic northern traditions infused with
the reality of spiritual events, biblical
interpretation, and dense composition,
as well as careful attention to naturalistic
details of flora and fauna. With
those he conjoined Italian Renaissance
approaches to compositional clarity,
three-dimensional modeling and perspective
in figures, and panoramic
breadth of landscape. He thus interprets
Saint John's phantasmagoric and poetic
visions by giving them a convincing
physical existence.

By suspending laws of nature only
where the biblical text necessitates,
while simultaneously emphasizing realistic
details of objects, Dürer makes
Saint John's visions concrete and believable.
The placid landscapes look real.
Except for heavenly beings, figures are
in contemporary dress. The figures'
bodies are modeled in the round and
they move in convincing ways. Details
of lighting, weather, objects, and plants
are accurate. In The Vision of Seven
Candlesticks, every candelabrum is different,
a precise and elaborate variation
on exactly the work being produced
at the time by goldsmiths in Nuremberg
and Augsburg. Dürer eliminates most
typical late medieval fictions such as
rotund monsters with fanged mouths
in their stomachs. The Fourth Rider of
the Apocalypse is no longer a childlike
fantasy of a smiling skeleton, as in an
earlier Bible woodcut, but a perfectly
believable emaciated man, as human as
the terrible images of prisoners released
from concentration camps. Certainly
we do not expect to see figures struggling
or praying while suspended in the
air, but if they did, their bodies could
be formed, their clothing could hang,
their facial expressions and actions
could look like those depicted here.
When Saint Michael fights an evil dragon—a biological hybrid bat-man-lizard—in the air, he is unnaturally suspended.
However, his body is bent in elegant
Mantegnesque counterpoise to thrust
his spear, his expression is intense with
effort, and his hands, knees, and feet
project toward us in an entirely credible
perspective. If the biblical metaphor has
the angel tell Saint John to eat (that is,
ingest, internalize) a book, Dürer's Apocolypse shows
Saint John actually cramming the pages
into his mouth. Dürer thus begins with
fantastic allegories and creates a believable
Apocalypse, forging an artistic strategy
used successfully, for example, in
the past century by H. G. Wells and
Stanley Kubrick. No wonder later visual
artists who took up the theme of the
apocalypse were overwhelmingly influenced
by 's images.

Dürer's Apocalypse was published
with woodcut images expanded over the
full page. He faithfully included the
entire biblical text of The Revelation to
Saint John—Ã\u0082Â\u0094 one issue in Latin, the
other in a German translation, but the
text was printed on the back of the
images. Turning the pages of a bound
copy, the reader would first see the full
image on the dominant right-hand side
and then the text on the left. Dürer thus reversed the emphasis in a typical
relation of text to image in this book,
the first designed, made, and published
by the same artist. Thirteen of the subjects
of Dürer's scenes are illustrated in
a bible published in 1483 by his godfather, Anton Koberger, and surely
provided him with a beginning point.
However, Dürer expanded the quaint
little woodcuts in that bible into
images five to fifteen times as large,
even bigger than the largest single-page
images in Koberger's famous 1493
Nuremberg Chronicle, some of whose
woodcuts he may have helped
design as a youth.

The larger size of Dürer's woodcuts
allowed for greater richness of his
pictorial field. Combined with inventive
techniques of drawing and cutting
the woodblocks, he created a revolutionary
new level of artistic subtlety and
flexibility. Typical earlier woodcuts had
heavy outlines for relatively flat forms
and figures, with occasional parallel
hatching to create shadows; most were
painted with watercolor to enhance and
clarify the images. Dürer, by contrast,
created much more supple lines that
vary in length, proximity, curvature,
and thickness. Thus, he was able to
model forms more roundly, light them
more convincingly, and vary their textures
more widely. These supple lines
made possible greater precision in the
details of figures and objects, reinforcing
his realism.

In addition, Dürer black-and-white woodcuts now had a
vast range of shades, from brilliant
light through varieties of grays to deepest
black, creating a range of tones or
"colors" that no longer needed added
watercolor. The subtlety of Dürer's lines
is so extraordinary that many scholars
have concluded he must have not only
drawn the images of his Apocalypse on
the woodblocks but also actually cut
the blocks himself—no professional
cutter could have understood the artistic
intent of every irregular variation in
line and pattern. He also may have
inked and printed the blocks himself to
achieve the range and sophistication of
tone we see in the final impressions.
Dürer acknowledged his thorough work
by signing every image with his monogram
and by signing his full name as
publisher at the end of the text. Here
he showed all later artists what a flexible
and amazing medium the woodcut
could be.

Why did make this extraordinary
breakthrough with a series of
images on the apocalypse? Scholars frequently
refer to late medieval ideas
about the importance of the sesquimillennium,
the year 1500, fears of a coming
end of the world, and the threat of
Turkish invasions into Europe. Yet the
issue is more complex. The size and
extent of this series, the sophistication
(and thus expense) of its execution, the
inclusion of the complete text of the
book, and above all the character of its
images mean it bears no relation to
contemporary broadsides that do reflect
the above themes with crude "news"
about meteorological and other apocalyptic signs, Antichrists, birth deformities,
and other portents of the end of
the world. Further, such works to feed
popular consumption had been in
continual production for many years,
not just as the end of the century
approached. Another major problem
with the historical theory is that at the
same time Dürer was producing his
Apocalypse he was also creating many
other works on various themes from
classical antiquity, contemporary genre,
and much milder religious subjects. No
contemporary artist's statement exists
to show Dürer's reasons or intentions
for any of these beyond our knowledge
of his travels and wider interests, and
of the works themselves. His Apocalypse cannot be reduced to late 15th-century
popular fears, but speaks with
a riveting force of timeless artistic
and spiritual power.

This complete and coherent set of
Dürer's Apocalypse in the first edition is
exceedingly rare, and so far as we know,
it is the last to remain in private hands.
It has been in Swiss private collections
since 1926, when it was purchased on
the advice of Joseph Meder, the greatest
20th-century cataloguer of Dürer's
prints. Only three other complete and
coherent first editions are in American
museums, all acquired more than 70
years ago—before the National
Gallery was even opened. The Gallery
already had many different types
of separate impressions from several
donors of Dürer's Apocalypse woodcuts,
some in proofs without texts, some with
texts from Latin as well as German first
editions, a complete second edition
(1511), and later impressions. This complete
first edition, however, becomes the
centerpiece of the collection. Combined
with the variety of other impressions,
this acquisition makes the Gallery a
major resource for appreciating the
development and aesthetic possibilities
of Dürer's most astounding set of works
on paper.